Can air taxis save the American heartland?

Last week I drove from Wichita in Kansas, where I visited Cessna, to Albuquerque in New Mexico, to see Eclipse Aviation and interview its inspirational founder Vern Raburn.

I'd never before had the opportunity to drive across the big American heartland, so, on this occasion I shunned the eight hours of airports and regional aircraft a journey by air between these cities would involve and opted for 11 hours by Chevvy instead.

It's a dull and desolate drive, with just religious and cheesy country rock radio stations for company for most of the way. Only the first red mountains of the Rockies in New Mexico and the signs for the rather dubious and desperate-sounding tourist attractions of the various towns lift the tedium of the flat landscape (I resisted the lure of \"The World's largest man-made well\", \"Toad museum\" and \"First chance to stop in Texas\"). But a journey like this highlights just how empty and dirt-poor parts of the rural USA are.

The America most foreigners see are the cities and the tourist hotspots - the resorts, national parks and picture postcard towns. Get off the visitor trail and you find welfare-dependent communities starved of jobs and investment, with empty farms, boarded up truckstops, grim trailer parks and rickety wooden churches. There are ghost towns in western Kansas and eastern New Mexico that have simply shut down. It's an America slowly bleeding to death.

That's where Vern comes in. Much has been written about his vision of a network of air taxis criss-crossing North America and offering cheap, frequent and flexible business travel - a new market the Eclipse 500 very light jet was at least partly designed for.

Raburn believes air taxis have the potential to prompt a seismic change not just in the way Americans travel but in the way they choose to live.

The theory works like this. The explosion in personal communications - an industry Raburn cut his teeth and made his fortune in - has made remote working possible. Millions of middle class Americans living in overcrowded, congested, crime-ridden cities would love to cash in their property assets and move to the country, where ranches can be bought for the price of a three-bedroom suburban house.

The main problem with doing that is the lack of transport links. People would like to swap town for country, believes Vern, but few are prepared to cut themselves off entirely from civilisation and face to face links with those they do business with. If they were able, however, to fly by air taxi from a local community airport once or twice a month, the lure of that remote Wyoming ranch becomes more appealing. It's something the government tried to do with interstate highways several generations ago, but, while these long strips of asphalt have long replaced the railroads as a means of transporting all but the heaviest goods between cities and states, the size of the country means thousands of small towns are many hours drive even from the nearest interstate junction.

Create a viable air taxi network and not just those opting for the good life but entrepreneurs seeking to set up businesses would be prepared to relocate to those threatened communities. The country is still peppered with small airports, many of them - like the communities they used to serve - ailing, dying or dead. But the infrastructure is there, providing the demand can be created.

It's a convincing argument, which is founded on the economics of building a business jet for \$1.5 million. Like the PC, air taxis have the potential to change our civilisation. And Vern the visionary hopes to do it. See www.eclipseaviation.com